their headquarters leaving one live man
behind to tell the story....

Unless they thought the third man was dead. If they were sure of
that ... _certain_ of it ... they would not hesitate to take the
remaining two away. And if, by chance, the third man wasn't as dead as
they thought he was, and could find a way to follow them home, there
might still be a chance to free the other two.

It was then that he thought of the _Scavenger_, and knew that he had
found a way.

In the cabin of the little scout ship he had worked swiftly, fearful
that at any minute one of the marauders might come aboard to search it.
Tom was no rocket pilot, but he did know that the count-down was
automatic, and that every ship could run on an autopilot, as a drone,
following a prescribed course until it ran out of fuel. Even the
shell-evasion mechanism could be set on automatic....

Quickly he set the autopilot, plotted a simple high school math course
for the ship, a course the Ranger ship would be certain to see, and to
fire upon. He set the count-down clock to give himself plenty of time
for the next step.

Both the airlock to the _Scavenger_ and to the orbit-ship worked on
electric motors. The _Scavenger_ was grappled to the orbit-ship's hull
by magnetic cables. Tom dug into the ship's repair locker, found the
wires and fuses that he needed, and swiftly started to work.

It was an ingenious device. The inner airlock door in the orbit-ship was
triggered to a fuse. He had left it ajar; the moment it was closed, by
anyone intending to board the _Scavenger_, the fuse would burn, a
circuit would open, and the little ship's autopilot would go on active.
The ship would blast away from its moorings, head out toward Mars....

And the fireworks would begin. All that he would have to worry about
then would be getting himself aboard the Ranger ship without being
detected.

Which was almost impossible. But he knew there was a way. There was one
place no one would think to look for him, if he could manage to keep out
of range of the viewscreen lenses ... the outer hull of the ship. If he
could clamp himself to the hull, somehow, and manage to cling there
during blastoff, he could follow Greg and Johnny right home.

He checked the fuse on the airlock once again to make certain it would
work. Then he waited, hidden behind the little scout ship's hull,
until the orbit-ship swung around into shadow. He checked his suit
dials ... oxygen for twenty-two